Imagine a show called the Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Husbands. Starring (just off the top of my head) Zaheer Khan, Siddharth Roy Kapoor and Anand Ahuja. Where they talk a little about cricket, movie production and the shoe-making industry, and a lot about what they wear, where they party and with whom, while swearing that they are going to put aside their entire career till their children (to be) are grown, because you know, career-shareer toh theek hai, but my kids need me and you know, fatherhood comes first. We get lots of shots of them walking in slow motion, wearing sunglasses, and partying, and in the end, Virat Kohli/Nick Jonas/Anil Ambani shows up and they all fawn at him, give him a king-like throne to sit on, and get teary-eyed about how he was always there for them through their hardest times.
The mind boggles, right? Because, OMG, everybody knows that Bollywood husbands are not just husbands, ya. They are their own person first, with their own independent career and identity. Whereas in the new Netflix show The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives (produced by Karan Johar’s ‘Dharmatic’ productions) Bollywood wives are clearly just... wives. Being the wife of a dud member of a star family and the mother of a (potential) future star, is their only identity and symbol of success. To do the ladies justice, and to use with-it lingo, they try to ‘own’ this badge as unapologetically and as sassily as they can, but there is no forgetting the fact that, to quote the obnoxious Kabir Singh from the movie Kabir Singh, “You had no aukaat in this college before you became my girlfriend.”
Illustration: Bhaskaran
To make things worse, one does not feel anything for them. And this is not because their problems are rich people problems. I think we would all concede that a rich girl starving herself, like Princess Diana is currently doing in Season 4 of The Crown, suffers as much as a poor girl starving in poverty in a third world country. But the dilemmas the wives face in FLBW are so trite that one simply cannot be moved by them. It is a world so vacuous that when the daughter of one of the wives is asked why she chose to wear red to a debutante ball in Paris (don’t even ask) she artlessly confides “so that everybody will look at me”, where a certain wife is considered edgy and out-there because she repeatedly says “a......” and “f...”, and where nobody speaks in Hindi except to their domestic staff but everybody wants their children to make it big in the Hindi movies.
In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the women are named after their keepers. Fred’s handmaid is Offred, Glen’s handmaid is Ofglen and Warren’s is Ofwarren. Bearing children for these men is literally their entire identity, and this is so eerily reminiscent of FLBW, where the wives are clearly hoping to be the next Pinky Roshan or Lalli Dhawan―and that the children they have birthed, all of whom have ‘proven’ DNA in their veins, are going to be the next superstar.
If one puts feminist quibbles aside, there is something quite fascinating about this bloody, no-holds-barred battle for succession. Frankly, I lost track of the Kapoor and Khan spawn as I watched; there seem to be dozens of south Bombay shehzadas and shehzadis, all first cousins and childhood friends―and all hoping to be launched by Karan uncle. (This probably explains why their machinating mamas did this vapid show in the first place.)
Unfortunately, the show captures none of these Game of Throne-ish undercurrents and stays determinedly superficial.
They say every country gets the leaders it deserves. Also, the entertainment it deserves. As FLBW tops Netflix India, beating out Ludo, Mismatched and the Emmy award-winning Delhi Crime, it says less about the wives and more about us as a country.